


goodbyes and golden nights

by atlantisairlock



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Author's Favorite, Child Neglect, F/M, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Light Angst, Original Character Death(s), Universe Alteration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-06 21:20:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5431112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlantisairlock/pseuds/atlantisairlock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes. Secrets, lies, stories. We all tell them. Sometimes, because we hope to entertain. Sometimes, because we need to distract. And sometimes, because we have to.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	goodbyes and golden nights

**Author's Note:**

> title from 'one night town' by ingrid michaelson.
> 
> summary from 'the storyteller' by jodi picoult.

Here's the deal. Regardless of what Amy says, everyone lies. By omission. By default. Everyone's got that one thing kept securely under lock and key, something that would be trivial in the eyes of everybody that isn't them, but would destroy them from inside out if it were ever made known.

This is Rosa's lie: 

She didn't meet Jake at the police academy. 

 

 

Rosa grows up in a crappy shack in the projects right beside an old apartment complex complete with peeling paint and two-room flats. It's not all that much better than what she calls home, but at least the locks on the doors work, and the electricity supply doesn't cut out for an hour every fortnight or so - Rosa would know; she spends most of her time skulking around the apartments and stealing what she can so her stomach isn't empty. She's too young to understand that the people she steals from are in straits almost as dire as her own; she just knows she's hungry, and her father is absent, and her mother is violent, and when she's grown she'll smirk at the cliché but as a child all she wants is to eat her fill. 

She's seven-going-on-eight when she picks the lock into a flat with a brightly painted door and walks into a living room that doesn't resemble any of those she's broken into before. It's cozy, a well-worn sofa facing a small TV set on top of a dresser, chalk and paint splatter on the walls, books and toys in a box by the kitchen. Rosa totally forgets about raiding the pantry. For once, a flat in this rundown apartment feels like it could be a home.

Rosa wanders around, touching the crayon drawings on the spluttering fridge and the smudges on the wall almost reverently. It's simple, ragged, but it's warm in more ways than one. She stops by the family photo framed over the washing machine - an old woman with grey hair, hugging a young boy and girl close to her. The girl has three bobby pins in her hair and sports a lazy smirk. The boy has bright eyes, looks scrawny, has a mouth missing one tooth, but he smiles like he's on top of the world.

She leaves after taking just one pack of plain crackers off the counter, and finds another home to break into instead.

 

 

It's almost a year before Rosa sees the boy again. Within that time, she becomes more adept at disappearing whenever her parents have fights that go to blows. Someone in the apartment complex reports a serial burglar to the cops, and young as she is, Rosa's smart enough to know when to cool her heels. She devotes her time to digging in the garbage instead. Not for food - she's not dumb, unlike some of the other kids from the rathole who poison themselves with the rancid roadkill thrown into the same bin as empty bottles of bleach and antifreeze. She picks out the stuff she can sell, uses the few coins and notes she gets in return to buy proper food. It's not glamorous, but it works, and for her, that's enough. 

The trash in the seedier area of their miserable excuse of a community is more dangerous to sift through, but for a hungry eight-year-old? The profit is worth the risk. The things that are thrown out by forgers, counterfeiters and drug dealers is worth far more than the commonplace stuff in the trash at the apartment buildings. That said, Rosa doesn't go there often, unless it's a bad week and she's starving. Dark alleys are not meant to be explored by kids, even the most hardened of street rats. So after a particularly rotten run, after her mother gets smashed and literally burns what little cash they have to keep the house warm, Rosa chances the seedy territory. She's halfway through a garbage bag located outside the house of a known drug dealer when the boy appears. He limps into the alley, sobbing, eyes red and watery, face flushed. He looks downright terrified when Rosa lifts her head to look at him. She knows she must look a sight - hair matted, clothes ragged, hands full of trash.

But something about how pathetic and fearful the boy looks, so different from the boy in her memory, makes Rosa stop. She drops a half-empty beer bottle back into the trash and steps closer. "Hey, you lost?"

The boy nods quickly, wiping his nose with his sleeve. Rosa sighs, wiping her hands off on her grimy shirt. It figures. There's no way he would be in here otherwise. "How did you get here? Why did you come?"

"Gina and I were playing Cops and Robbers, and I turned the wrong way," he sniffs. 

Gina. Rosa guesses that's the girl in the photo that was with this boy. She frowns. From here to the apartment blocks is a long way, and the onset of winter cuts the day short and makes it too cold for her to keep scavenging. She'll lose a lot of time if she leads him home. But Rosa knows all kinds of harm could befall this boy if she doesn't. Rosa walks over to him, tries to act as gruff as she can for a pint-sized child. "Don't be a dumbo and come here again, OK? This place isn't for kids like you."

His bottom lip trembles as he nods, and Rosa holds out her hand. "Follow me. I'll bring you home."

He eyes her grubby hand doubtfully, and for a moment Rosa thinks he might run in the opposite direction, but then he steps forward and slips his soft hand into hers. These hands have never dug through garbage, Rosa realises, and when she looks into his wide, wet eyes, she feels a fierce need to make sure he never has to. 

Leading the boy through the maze of shacks makes Rosa uncomfortably aware of just how dark and dank and dangerous the projects are. This boy is wearing a neon yellow t-shirt with a cartoon turtle printed on it and shorts that look brand new and his fingernails are trimmed and clean. First and foremost, Rosa envies him for that innocence he possesses that she was never allowed to have, but some visceral part of her wants to protect this boy, protect that naivety of sorts. Rosa tugs on his hand, quickening her pace. "Come on, faster!' 

The boy obeys, pattering after her in his worn sneakers. Rosa navigates the twists and turns like a pro until she finally gets to the front of the apartment building. "Here you are," she mumbles, staring up at the tall block, and is surprised when the boy throws his arms around her with a wide smile speaking of joy and disbelief. "Thank you!" 

And that should be the end of it - Rosa should slink back into the gutters - but he fumbles in his pocket and retrieves a pristinely wrapped name-brand chocolate bar and pushes it into her hands. "You look hungry," he says, matter-of-fact, too young and guileless for pity, as Rosa stares down at the partly-melted chocolate in her hands, mouth watering. A full bar of chocolate. It's not nutritious, but it's sugary, it's energy, it's a treat. She can already taste it on her tongue. This boy has given her heaven, if just for five minutes. Rosa looks up at him, then scrambles to find something in her own pockets, with a sinking feeling. They're empty, but for the small nuts and bolts and other stuff she'll be selling off. 

That's when she remembers her Star Trek badge, the one she found in the dump a week or so ago, her one decorative object she retrieved for its beauty and not its profit value. She loves it, she wears it everywhere. She thinks this boy would like it too. With deliberate care, Rosa removes it, and pins it to the boy's shirt, above the cartoon turtle. If it's possible, his smile gets even wider. "You're really going to give that to me?" 

She knows, then, that he'll treasure it. "Don't come into the projects again," Rosa warns, straightening up. 

The boy nods sombrely, then his eyes light up at the sound of someone shouting. He turns to face the apartment block, where the old woman from the photo is waving frantically at him. Rosa takes her chance and slips back to the dark alleys of the projects. 

When he turns back to say a proper goodbye, she's gone. 

 

 

The years after that get worse. Her father loses his job as a trucker and stays home getting drunk. Her parents spend all of their time fighting and it comes to a head when she's out scavenging. They beat each other bloody, her father drags her mother by the hair to the front of the apartment block, and cracks a bottle of beer over her head. It's witnessed by fifty people. When Rosa comes home, the cops are there, and Social Services whisks her off, gives her a warm bed, a full dinner. Rosa is eleven, and her jaw is steel, her eyes are cold, but she still carries a carefully wrapped square of foil in her pocket wherever she goes, and that bar of chocolate from three years before still keeps her warm throughout the nights. 

She gets lucky, and she's painfully aware of that. A middle-aged couple with warm smiles take her home just nine months after her parents' deaths. They've fostered eight children and they've turned out wonderfully, according to the worker. Rosa ends up in a beautiful two-story home with an open kitchen and front garden, two dogs, many siblings who treat her like one of their own. It's the proverbial picket fence, and god does she try to fit in. But the projects will forever be part of her - which is why the first time someone at the ballet academy taunts her for the colour of her skin and the fact that she's adopted, she punches the living shit out of them. 

Her foster parents are understanding, in their own subdued way. Her tormentor gets a stern warning and a long lecture, and Rosa in turn gets a brief talk from her adoptive mother and a hug before she goes to bed. 

But she still hears the whispers and the laugh when she's at the barre, and when she turns fifteen, she's had enough. She loves ballet, but apparently ballet's for the upper-class, and she will never be one of them. If her parents are disappointed, they don't show it, and her foster father tells her that knowing one's limits is an admirable quality. 

It's her oldest foster brother that inspires her to join the police academy. He comes home for her eighteenth birthday, all booming laughter and huge grin, holding her present above his head. After dinner he and Rosa catch up, and he tells her everything that being a cop entails, the joys of it, the bittersweet moments, the crushing pain of not being able to save someone, and by the end of the night, when the family waves him off and he drives away back to his own home, Rosa knows what she wants to be. 

Somewhere inside her, she's also thinking of that boy. Even when she's so far from the projects, she remembers him, and wonders how he is. How he's growing up. Whether he forgot her when she didn't. She thinks about him coming to any harm, and the familiar vestiges of that burning desire to protect him return. 

She's good at protecting people, Rosa thinks. Maybe she ought to make a career out of it. 

She signs up to be a cop. 

 

 

The first day she walks in, there are wolf-whistles, and derogatory comments, and snide remarks, and she wants to punch everyone in the face.

But the first day she walks in - there is the boy. 

He's older now, just like her, taller, not as gangly, his hair messier, but his bright eyes and bright smile are unmistakable. Rosa freezes in her tracks and her hand drifts to her pocket, where the square of foil rests. 

He's not wearing her Star Trek badge. 

And obviously he  _doesn't_ recognise her, because he plops into a seat next to her and reaches one hand across to her with a goofy grin. "Hi, I'm Jake Peralta."

Rosa stares at his hand, the one she held when she was just a kid, taking him home. A curious potpourri of emotion swells and breaks inside her, and she doesn't respond. Jake doesn't lose his blinding grin, just drops his hand once more. He settles into his seat beside her, and whistles a tune. 

Something warms in the pit of her belly when she realises it's the Star Trek theme song. 

 

 

Despite their bad start, they become friends. Which is mostly because practically everyone else in the academy alongside them in an absolute shithead and throws slurs at both of them. For Jake, it makes sense to stick with the most threatening person he knows. For Rosa, it's because after all that time, she still wants to keep him safe. It's not that he can't keep himself safe, which he can, and he's a cis straight, abled white man, which, frankly, yeah. But he's childlike in his behaviour, still, and every time she looks at him, she still sees that stupid cartoon turtle. 

She comes close to telling him a couple of times. But then one night he gets drunk and he starts telling her this story about the girl who led him home one time he got lost in the seedy streets beside his apartment and how the dumb little kid he was thought she was his guardian angel, and how she was his first puppy love of sorts and how Gina told him he'd never find her because he probably just dreamed her up. 

He's snoring by the time he finishes his story, and Rosa decides then and there he'll never know. Perhaps it's better that way, for him to believe he imagined it, that he had a little-kid crush on a fantasy.

 

 

They join the Nine-Nine together, they go out on drinks a lot together, they watch action movies at his place, she laughs once or twice at his jokes. She knows everything about him, and out of necessity, the reverse isn't true. She's fond of him, she'll admit, and the day he places an old, battered Star Trek badge on his tabletop in the bullpen beside his tin can of pencils, her heart skips a beat. 

And they're just - well. Friends. Best friends. She looks out for him, and maybe Gina too, when she lands a job at the precinct. 

Everything changes because of Charles. 

Charles is the idiot who decides to ask them, on a slow day, whether they're dating.

Predictably, Jake fake-laughs as loudly as possible, as if that's the biggest joke he's ever heard. It peters out when he realises she's not smirking, and the atmosphere gets awkward fast.

The truth it - Rosa doesn't know what to say. She knows she cares about him, but that way? She has always, always wanted to keep him safe, and that hasn't changed as the years have passed, but could she really -

Rosa gets up, and goes to Babylon.

 

 

Gina is the one who finds her there five minutes later, when Rosa is sitting on the armchair they shoved into the bathroom. She has a deerstalker on her head. She doesn't give Rosa much time to wonder where she found it before she's going on a spiel. "All right, Gina's going to put her detective skills to the test. Let me lay out the story, okay?" She leans in close, drops her voice to a whisper. "Once upon a time, when we were kids, Jake and I were playing Cops and Robbers, because he's a nerd. Jake got lost, and a girl led him home. That girl was you. And now you're in love with him."

Rosa frowns; that's definitely not how she would have told it. "No, I'm not."

"Oh, Ro-Ro," Gina answers patronisingly, patting her on the arm. "Do you need me to break it very gently to him?"

Alarm lances through her. It's the closest to panic she's ever been since she got out of the projects. "You can't tell him."

To her credit, Gina looks genuinely curious. "Why not?"

She hesitates. "I don't want him to know," she says lamely, but this is the truth - she still wants to protect Jake, and his fairytale memory of his guardian angel. Rosa is afraid - afraid that now that he knows her for who she is, she won't live up to everything he ever made her out to be. 

Gina studies her with a critical eye roaming lazily across her face. "You know, young Jake might've needed you to protect him, but... Jake today isn't the shiniest star on the dance floor, but he can protect himself." 

Rosa sometimes wishes Gina wasn't so incisive. 

 

 

Jake approaches her later, when she's in the evidence locker, looking worried. "Hey, listen, about what happened out there..." 

Rosa exhales and looks at him, really  _looks._ For the first time, she really sees how much older he looks. How he's long lost that softness about his jaw, there's the slight curve of muscle along his arms that tells of hours of hard work he put in at the academy, the way he stands proud, unflinching, when he's in the zone. In a moment of decision, she grabs his hand - and it fits; even after so many years, sliding her hand into his feels eerily familiar. She drags him to his desk and picks up the badge, despite his squawk of protest, and stares him in the eye.

"When you were a kid," she says, low and measured. "You once played a game of Cops and Robbers with Gina outside your apartment. You took a wrong turn, and you landed up in the seedy side of the projects. You couldn't find your way home, and you were crying, and you didn't stop until a girl took your hand and led you back. You gave her a bar of chocolate as thanks." Rosa drops his hand and reaches into her jacket pocket for the square of foil she keeps safe in a tiny plastic baggie. "And in return, I gave you my badge." 

Jake's eyes get wider and wider as he listens in rapt fascination. Rosa holds both items out in one palm, and he reaches for the foil, picks it up with more reverence than she's ever seen him treat any object. "I didn't make you up," he breathes with the faintest tone of triumph, fingering the foil between his finger and thumb before passing it back and taking his badge. "Why didn't you tell me earlier?"

Rosa wants to glare at him, but his expression is earnest and open, as always, and she can't help but soften around the edges. "I'm not the little girl you fell in love with," she responds flatly, and she doesn't expect him to, but Jake smiles. "I'm not the little boy whose ass you saved." 

And yeah, Rosa thinks, he's not the little boy she led home, he's not the little boy who gave her his bar of chocolate, not anymore, not really - but he's funny, and kind, courageous and loyal and genuine, and he's not without his flaws but the world seems a little brighter when he smiles and holds her hand. She's always thought, especially after evaluating her foster siblings' respective other halves, that after seeing what she's seen, doing what she's done, after a childhood plagued by fear, violence, hunger - that she'd need someone as gritty, tired, haunted by demons, to be able to love them, to be able to be loved in return. And maybe that's the kind of men and women she's been trying her hand with, but maybe - just  _maybe_ \- what she really needs has always been right there beside her, in a guise she just didn't recognise.

Jake takes her hand. "Romantic-stylez," he grins, and a small smile creeps up onto Rosa's face. "You're telling Charles."

"Deal."

 

 

Every anniversary after that, Jake gives her a bar of chocolate; she keeps the foil packets, and in turn he starts assembling a fine assortment of Star Trek badges. But still he wears the first one he ever got on his shirt every single day, and still she carries her square of foil around in her pocket, and every time Rosa kisses him, she tastes cream and chocolate and warmth, harking back to that one day so many years before. 


End file.
